The Poison Sky (10 page)

“You're welcome to look in his study, Jack.” She was quiet a moment and he nearly fell asleep again. Maybe he did. “How come your life took its abstemious turn?”

“Probably just vanity,” he mumbled.

“How do you mean?” She finished off her drink and looked like she wanted more.

If he hadn't been so drowsy, he probably would have fobbed her off and left it. “The first real thing you learn when you hit middle age is that things might just not work out for you. It's a shock. Then they actually
don't
work out. At that point you start thinking about mortality, you're part of the human condition after all, not some exceptional case. Death is really waiting up the road for you. I get that feeling on every long car trip now.” He wondered what on earth he was yammering about, but he was too weary to listen closely to himself. “When you get in that state, every car coming toward you is a danger. Your kitchen knives are too sharp. The airliner overhead might fall on you. You get the feeling you've been surrounded all your life by deadly stuff that's been watching you with a kind of testy patience, and all you've got left to keep that stuff at bay is doing your job the best you can, trying to measure up. So you clean up your act.” He broke off, feeling foolish.

“Wow,” she said. “You have one
demanding
guardian angel.”

“That must be it.”

She went to the kitchen and got herself another drink. From the depth of color, he wondered if it was straight booze.

“I think I know you well enough now.” She opened the big photo album and slid it toward him on the coffee table. It was an old-style album, musty smelling, with the items held in place by little stick-on corners. He saw a hokey posed photograph of a line of a little girls in tights doing their best to take up some ballet posture on one raised toe as they clung to the barre in front of a mirror wall.
PITIKOVSKY DANCE STUDIO, MARCH
1962 was picked out with stick-on white letters on a changeable board propped against the wall. The camera was at enough of an angle so it didn't show itself in the wall of glass. One little girl, smaller and skinnier than the others, had her face circled in red ink and a mashed string of red yarn ran off the photo to the caption,
Faye Trani, age 9.

The next page was a clipping from a local newspaper about a junior ballet performance. Faye's name was circled halfway down the story. There was another dance-studio portrait, then a sole portrait of the little girl in a tutu in front of a painted backdrop of a Swiss mountain. The book of memorabilia went on like that, except Faye's name started featuring in the headlines, and the groups of girls that seemed to be flocking here and there like quail became centered on her. There were a lot of pink ribbons clipped off ballet slippers, mash notes from people praising her work, an amateur photograph of her on stage taken from the audience, then, all by itself, a letter offering her an apprenticeship with the Western Metropolitan Ballet Theater.

“I lived dance,” she said. “The way moving your body with grace can make you feel. It's more satisfying than an orgasm.”

“And all that applause.”

“That doesn't hurt, but the real reasons are inside yourself. Feeling the movements. Hitting exactly the right pitch, I mean
exactly,
like an archer splitting the previous arrow.” She made a small clutching gesture with two fists like a golfer who'd just nailed a long putt.

“I know the punch line is coming,” he said, “but this time I'll keep my shirt on.”

She acknowledged his patience with a little nod. “I would never have been the prima ballerina in New York, but maybe in a regional ballet. I was
very
good and it's enough to excel. That's what I grew up wanting. I wanted to excel. That's vanity, Jack.”

“Maybe not, if you're good.”

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. “I was sixteen. It started as a little crack in a bone called the navicular, up in the arch of my left foot. The ligaments of your foot are so strong that sometimes, under a sharp stress, the bones will break before the ligaments even strain. I felt something and I iced it, but of course that didn't help. Then I danced on it. The pain was excruciating. I guess they call it playing hurt in football, but it's really stupid. Three operations later they told me I should never go up on pointe again or I'd end up crippled. For a long time after, even when something that important to you is gone, it's still all you have. I even considered going to Vegas as a chorine.” She shook her head. “I married Milo and let my body go. That's what those little Theodelphian bastards found out about me by banging on my religious reflexes. I didn't even know it still hurt so bad, but they hurt me with it.”

All of a sudden he realized she was sitting right next to him, and she turned one more page to display an X ray of a foot. She tugged it out of the corners and held it against the light to show him a hairline crack. “God, I hate that little white line. Nothing has ever been right since.” Her voice was slurring, and she rested her head against his shoulder. “Just substitutes. You wonder if it's God's vengeance for being so vain, for wanting the passion so badly.”

“Accidents don't have meanings,” he said.

“I know. All that stuff you saw in this room, I was just trying to work out some choreography I remembered.” She shrugged and rubbed her head against him. She caught up his forearm and held it for a moment, then pulled his arm around her shoulders, like teens at the drive-in. “Things haven't been working between Milo and me for over a year, Jack,” she said, and then she was asleep and snoring softly.

He was relieved because her story made him like her a lot more than he had at first, but he couldn't have let things slide any further. He lowered her so her head settled against his leg and then leaned back himself. He was so weary he couldn't hold his eyes open. Some bodyguard he'd make, he thought, when the redhead came in through the window.

He woke with a start, a cramp seizing his leg. He was alone on the sofa, and light streamed in through gauze curtains. Soft classical music was playing, and like an apparition, Faye suddenly danced across his vision wearing tights and a black turtleneck. She was very graceful. She kicked, spun, and performed some fluid gesture with her arms, then disappeared again.

“It's a wonder you didn't take advantage of such a vulnerable creature last night.”

“Who says I didn't?” he said, now that it was safe.

She laughed, somewhere out of sight, and came right back with a mug of black coffee for him. It smelled heavenly.

“I think I kind of made a fool of myself.”

“Not with me, you didn't.”

“Oh, yes, I did.” She sipped from her own coffee mug, tucking one leg in and extending it repeatedly, as if testing her memory of the movement. “You never forget how to do it,” she said, and smiled. “If you're going to be abstemious, you ought to deny yourself caffeine, too.”

“Everything has its limits, even moderation.”

“I used to think people either chose the passionate life or they chickened out and gave up to get calm and security. But they're both choices. Whichever way you choose, you lose the other.”

“It's probably possible to lose both,” he said. He had to get home and shower and change before he picked up Maeve. “I'd like a quick look in Milo's study.”

“Help yourself.”

A kind of tension developed inside him as the day took on reality. Beside Milo's desk there was a three-foot-high stack of books resting on the floor, each with a number of paper bookmarks. Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, plus a lot of names he didn't recognize. There were small slips of notepaper scattered across the desk. He picked up a few at random:

Spectacle is a degree of accumulation beyond the physical. It is money only looked at.

Commotion is the result of the cultural exhaustion of a people.

There are already too many ideas
—
and rhetorical excess is used to squeeze out one essence, any essence.

Yes, indeed, Milo did seem to be thrashing around in critical theory. There was a yellow Post-it stuck to the computer screen, the message a bit different from the other notes:
Against so many lives, I don't matter a damn.

He fumbled around until he got the computer and the modem turned on. He knew enough about personal computers to sign the machine onto the Internet, but as he'd expected, he couldn't get into Milo's E-mail without a password. He left it running.

There were a few computer books on a shelf behind the computer, a lot of printouts of philosophical monographs that looked as impenetrable as the notes, a photograph of Yosemite with Faye and a young boy standing in front of Bridal Veil Falls, and a couple of handmade ceramic pots.

He hunted Faye down. She was still tucking and untucking her left leg and staring dreamily out the kitchen window.

“I'll call you later.”

“Thanks for looking after me, Jack.” She seemed about to make another confession.

“I've got to run. I turned on Milo's computer. Don't turn it off until tonight.”

That intrigued her and broke her concentration so she stumbled.

7

FULL COMBAT GRAMMAR

I
T WASN'T THE USUAL BOYFRIEND HE SAW PEERING OUT THE
window to make sure Maeve got into a nice safe car. The man had a scrubby little caterpillar mustache and beady eyes, like Neville Chamberlain stepping off the plane from Munich. So Kathy had dumped the English teacher, he thought. He was happy to see that her love life wasn't working out much better than his.

Maeve came gaily down through the bougainvillea swinging the little checkered suitcase that looked like something an Eastern European refugee would carry. Her limbs were still as gangly as when he'd seen her last two months back—it had taken Kathy that long to relent on the visits—but Maeve looked like she was starting to get breasts, and he figured that was something he'd better not tease about.

“Daddy!” She pecked his cheek and he took the suitcase from her. It was as if they'd only been apart a day.

“Hi, sweetie. Wouldn't you like something a little more stylish than this?” He put it into the trunk carefully, trying to keep it away from various grease-stained car parts.

She shrugged graciously. “I know you don't have a lot of money.”

He laughed. “That's like calling the bubonic plague a little chest rash, but we might be able to work something out. I've got a couple of clients.”

“A couple?”

“Okay, one,” he admitted. “But she's paying. Who's he?”

She knew who he meant but she didn't really want to talk about it.

“So the English teacher went and got his verbs all parsed? What's this one do? Install carpets? Hit man?”

“Dan sells real estate.”

“Oh,
Je
sus.”

“Don't be bigoted.”

“
Bigoted.
We're getting a vocabulary.”

“Pooh. Dan's a nice guy.”

Jack Liffey put on an odd strangled voice. “I can't be selling da house today. Da voices tell me it is time to clean all da guns.”

She started giggling and climbed in. “I know he looks strange, but he's not weird,
really.
You're weird, you know, and I've got something else weird for you. I've got to know one thing first.” They saved up the oddities for one another like jewels—and it was a regular battle to one-up the opponent with the strangest. “You still touchy about earthquakes?”

He wrinkled up his forehead. An aftershock of the last big quake had caught him in a collapsing house trying to rescue a client and given him a skull fracture. He'd been in a coma for a while and it had been touch and go, and the hair was still growing back where they'd put a metal plate in. He'd never go into an airport again without setting off all the alarms.

“Touchy's not in my vocabulary, honey.”

“Good. Turn left up on Artesia. You'll never beat this one.”

There was a last disturbance of the front curtain as he drove off; he guessed it was Kathy this time. Okay, sure, he was still driving that 1979 AMC Concord with one primer fender.

“You look tired, Daddy.”

“I was up early beating up bad guys to defend my client's honor.”

She clung to his arm and rested her head against him. “I wouldn't have it any other way.” And he felt such a wave of love for her that he had to slow down for a bit.

T
HE
road ended in a forest of parking meters fronting the beach. The last shops near the beachfront were pretty much what you'd expect—a seafood café, a bar, a liquor store, and a swimsuit bazaar with all the bright little hankies of cloth hanging limp from racks.

“It's over there on the side of Jeannie's.”

He parked and followed her to the tiny shingled café where a sign hawked cappuccino, burgers, and menudo. She skipped ahead a bit in the sun and it took her age back a notch or two. It was going to be a scorcher, he thought. He'd only been out of the car a minute and his hair already felt like hot wires burning his scalp.

She went along a little concrete alleyway and made a grand flourish to end up pointing with both hands at something on the wall of the café. When he caught up he saw it was a plaque, cast in some sort of bronze-colored metal that wasn't doing so bad at resisting the salt air. He had to stoop a bit to read it.

N
EAR THIS SPOT ON
M
AY
7, 1972,
AN EIGHT-FOOT ACUPUNCTURE NEEDLE WAS INSERTED INTO THE EARTH TO CONTACT THE SOUTHERN ENERGY CONVERGENCE OF THE REGION'S
L
ATERAL
T
ORSION
M
ERIDIAN AND PREVENT ANY FURTHER EARTHQUAKES.
A
CUPUNCTURE NEEDLES WERE INSERTED SIMULTANEOUSLY AT
G
RIFFITH
O
BSERVATORY AND THE BED OF THE
L
OS
A
NGELES
R
IVER AT
H
OLLYDALE
P
ARK NEAR
L
YNWOOD
. H
ERMOSA TEAM
: T
HOM
B
REEDSDALE
, M
ARIANNE
S
TONE
, J
ACK
L
IVEY
, P
ICO
R
AMOS
. A
CUQUAKE
'72 P
ROJECT
. P
OSSUNT QUIA POSSE VIDENTUR
.